Dell PowerStore Reviews

We use the Dell PowerStore 1000, 5000, 5200, 7000, and 9200 models in our environment. We have a ten-petabyte environment and we use it for structuring storage for our SQL data basis, our search engine, and backend storage for our Kubernetes environment.

We have seen a reduction in data center space, power cooling, and the number of people required to maintain the platforms. Now that it is PowerStore Prime, it has feature parity with previous generation products when it comes to what it can do from a software perspective, which is nice as well. Also because it is a flash product with no moving parts, I can trust that it is available 99.99 percent of the time.

It depends on the workload. I'm seeing data reductions upwards of three to one. In some areas, I'm seeing data reductions of one point six to one on other workloads, but that's because it has encryption already built into it. So when they don't do compression, they're not necessarily deduplication. And so it varies by work but you do see the savings there. The easiest way to quantify it is I can get the same capacity on a high-performance all-flash model that we were getting on a much larger deployment, spinning disk of a previous generation product. Given the amount of storage we have, the cost savings are in the six if not seven figures.

CloudIQ has provided a single pane of glass. There have been some issues with CloudIQ but we have been able to work through them. The nice thing about it isn't necessarily that it just tells me the health of my storage but also gives me performance metrics. Most importantly, it allows me to see my capacity and to project capacity constraints over time within a certain confidence range.

PowerStore reduces our energy consumption. I only have so much power available in my data center and since I can now put a greater capacity footprint within a rack in a space, I can now put other things in its place because of the reduced energy consumption.

Dell is a leader in what they call ESG values. I'm familiar with a lot of things they have done when it comes to working with other countries, and conservation efforts, especially with water. It's impressive to put this much energy and effort into that because it comes at a cost to Dell, so I know it is important to them.

We are utilizing PowerStore integrations, like PowerProtect, VMware, DevOps Container Store, and others. Now that we're at a PowerStore Prime. It's taking a while to get here, but now we can see the benefits within the VMware environments, we can also see benefits on how quickly we can deploy. Especially in our Kubernetes environment, containerization makes a big difference. We can now deploy multiple times within a day as opposed to taking days for a single deployment.

The Dell data reduction guarantee is reliable. I have been supplied with extra capacity from Dell because the reduction guarantee was not met and they stand behind it.

The most valuable features of PowerStore are its density and data reduction. Combined they allow for a larger data footprint in a smaller area. It is high-performing. I get good latency and high access times for mission-critical workloads. I can scale it to meet my needs and it is reliable.

I would like a feature parity on the software side. I've been with PowerStore since version one dot zero. I've been through the growing pains of the software. The hardware has always been reliable. The software has been evolving. The biggest area in PowerStore that needs improvement is the overall visibility within the ESX environment. I haven't seen PowerStore Prime yet. I'm hoping that it'll be like it was with Unity. I am assuming it will be but I haven't seen it. That's one area if it's not done. The other area is SNMP deployment so that I can use my own observability platforms to see its performance.

One area of suggestion for the platform engineering team is that when they do introduce new features not turn them on by default, let the customer decide if they want to use those new features. It's been more than once that I have done a software upgrade and started something that's caused a negative impact on my environment.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for four years.

Dell PowerStore is stable.

The scalability has improved with the newer systems. I'm running multi-petabyte storage appliances for block workloads, which is impressive. I'd like to be able to continue adding on more, but there are always limitations to every system. There is always the processor level and we don't want to exceed that. Over time, as processing gets more powerful, the scalability will increase with it. I don't think that's different with any storage product.

I am comfortable with the Dell technical support. I work with them all the time. We've had some issues with parts availability for our mission-critical support, it could take over a day or two while waiting for parts. It's been remedied by working with some executive teams to get parts mobilized for my implementation. Every support issue that I've had has been remedied in some way, but it's taken some effort.

Positive

Our initial deployment was not good. There's a lot of learning curve for the deployment team as well. We used professional services, but the way the clustering of PowerStore, we have multiple appliances working together needs to be set up, requires certain networking services to be running that wasn't a hundred percent clear, and it took us a while to understand why we weren't getting the expected results from our deployment. I have deployed a lot of these things now in my environment. Occasionally, we still run into the problem. Every deployment team is a little bit different here and some just assume that we need to have an IPv6 network enabled in the environment for it to work. They just need to be reminded. They're not complicated. They are dense and are fitted within a rack. There's not a lot of connectivity that we have to do. I use a fiber channel on mine. So that simplifies it if I had to do more IP networking too, it would probably be more complex.

We have evaluated competitors for storage solutions. PowerStore took a while to get to par with some competitors, but I believe they're there now. The cost is better with Dell. The biggest area where I find it beneficial to stay with a single vendor for storage is that I can work with one support organization and not have to worry about finger-pointing.

I would rate Dell PowerStore eight out of ten. I like it because of its performance. I have very complex workloads that run against it in sub-millisecond latencies. I get good data reduction which has improved over time. The GUI is straightforward. The only reason I'm not giving it higher than an eight right now is that it still takes a little more effort to integrate with our VMware environment compared to Unity. The VMware environment sees the Unity, and we add it. That may not be fixed with PowerStore Prime. I'm not on that version yet. So that's to be determined. if that gap is cleared, I will rate PowerStore higher.

We are 100 percent a Dell shop for storage and computing but do not use Dell for networking.

We use it for machines from VMware vCenter which we keep separate from the PowerStore. It is only the storage. They are connected with iSCSI and NFS. We have no virtual machines directly on the PowerStore.

We are very impressed by the power of the system. We have gained performance for all our virtual machines and our system is running very fast.

Another benefit, for us, is the dedupe rate.

For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance.

Also, the live dedupe application is very good.

In the first weeks, we had some problems with the dedupe. According to the warranty, we should have had a dedupe rate of at least two and we had not reached this value. We got an additional hard disk to match the planned capacity of the system and this helped a lot. We got to a dedupe rate of 1.9, and this was very good.

What we are missing is the monitoring. We cannot implement the health check of the system in our monitoring system. We have to open the PowerStore GUI every day.

Also, we have tried to install a separate virtual machine to integrate PowerStore to vCenter. VMware then provides a virtual machine with Photon OS. We have done this integration two times and it has run for some weeks. Then it stops working and I don't know why. We have not used it again. It has nice features and has saved a lot of time and creates a good integration, but it needs to be more stable.

Overall, they need to make the system stable. Again and again, we have problems with upgrades. The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, "This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2." We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, "Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1." Overall, they need to make the system stable.

I try to avoid updates for such important, central systems. They require downtime for the whole company, as this is our only storage. It's not good to do so many upgrades. I have used other storage systems and, with them, it was never necessary to do so many upgrades in one year. Last year, I did four upgrades for the PowerStore but I have never done four upgrades over the lifetime of other storage systems. They have run four, five, or six years, sometimes more. I have never patched so often as I have with PowerStore.

We have been using Dell EMC PowerStore since December of last year, so almost a year.

The problem is the stability. We have a single system and on three occasions we have had unplanned head reboots because of a software failure. The positive side is that there was no impact as a result because there are two heads. It's not good to reboot a head, and we have submitted tickets about it, but the performance and the failover have been good.

We only have a single machine and we are currently using half of the hard disk slots. We have asked for an upgrade for the rest of the hard disks but, from my point of view, it costs too much. We have 12 to 15 hard disks inside and if we try to upgrade only the hard disks, it costs the same as the complete system. This is something I don't understand. It makes no sense. Buying 16 hard disks with storage costs about €40,000 and buying only 16 hard disks costs the same.

Dell EMC's first-level technical support is very fast and they communicate well. Sometimes they explain things so I can understand why something is working the way it is. But currently, we have a ticket at the second level and for two weeks I have had no answer. 

The issue is that each day we get a message from the storage, every three hours, telling us the network connectivity is lost. I don't know if this is true or not, and whether it is a failure. That is the ticket at level two but I have had no information about its status.

Neutral

I have used NetApp as well as HPE in the past. In this company, they replaced NetApp with PowerStore because the NetApp system was slow. The dedupe needed much improvement. If they stopped the dedupe, then the system power would go down. And the backup procedure took a lot of time. With PowerStore we have reduced the time for the backup by half or more.

In terms of the decision process to go with PowerStore, I was not working here at the time. After I started the company said, "Okay, in two weeks we are getting new storage. Please integrate it into our infrastructure." I know they needed a more powerful storage system and they wanted an upgrade option for the system.

The integration of PowerStore into our existing environment was very straightforward. We had an external partner that helped us, but we had prepared the system in a test environment. We took that system and put it into the production system in about eight hours and the system was running. We then started to migrate the machines. It was a good implementation process and very fast.

We have two administrators of the solution. They are working with the system full-time handling requests to change hard disks or volumes, and they create new volumes. Across the company we have about 300 users using virtual machines and virtual desktops that are stored on the PowerStore.

The performance of PowerStore is good, but I don't feel the software is completely ready. We have upgraded the system and have had failures on the system. I have never seen as many head crashes on other systems as we have had on the PowerStore in the last year. The system is fast but not stable enough.

I would not buy the system again. You should wait some years until the software is ready and doesn't have a new software release every two months.

I am primarily using the solution in mostly virtualized environments. This includes databases and a diverse mix of virtualization.

The use of NVMe is notable, and the speed and performance it provides are commendable. Fast storage is critical to many applications. The faster the back-end storage, the quicker the entire application performs. NVMe, in particular, makes a significant difference.

I am not a fan of the user interface. My background includes working with EMC Clarion and then Dell Compellent. The Compellent user interface is better than any of their other products. PowerStore originated from EMC, while Compellent was a separate company acquisition. Unfortunately, the tools were not merged. The bottom line is the user interface is functional, but not aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes, I find it difficult to get the required information. The performance is good, but the management experience and user interface are lacking. Years ago, I would have rated it extremely high. Now, I would say it deserves a seven. I occasionally encounter individuals who cannot assist me well or quickly and provide some pushback on issues. Generally, it's acceptable, so a seven is fair. I think they could improve integration into virtualization. They have an integration feature with VMware, but it's basic and clunky. They could improve that. Also, I don't think they support other hypervisors. The product is expensive. Initially, you might get a deal, but if you need to add anything later, that's where costs increase. It's possible to buy a PowerStore array at a certain price and then pay as much for additional disks just to expand it.

I have used the solution for about three or four years.

The scalability seems straightforward. We have only added disks but have not added appliances. We have single appliance clusters. We could add appliances, but clusters with multiple appliances tend to have more upgrade issues. That's not my direct experience, just what I've heard.

Years ago, I would have rated customer service extremely high. Now, I have to say, maybe a seven. I occasionally run across a person who cannot help me well or quickly and provide some pushback on issues.

Neutral

We moved from Dell Unity. We still have Dell Unity, but we needed the next better thing without going into PowerMax.

The product is expensive. Initially, you might get a deal, but if you need to add anything later, that's where costs increase. It's possible to buy a PowerStore array at a certain price and then pay as much for additional disks just to expand it.

Overall, I would give it an eight out of ten. The user interface and the pricing model should be improved. Subsequent disk purchases should be more reasonable, in my opinion. I haven't met a Dell array yet that has achieved the promised data reduction. We don't use containers. We don't use the vCenter integration because it doesn't do much for us. It's very basic.

Dell PowerStore is our Tier 2 storage used for general-purpose servers and applications.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore, compared to previous products, is probably the ease of installation and upgrades. 

The benefits our organization has received from installing Dell PowerStore include a smooth transition from previous storage, Unity and previous Dell storage, making for an easy migration.

One of the big differences when we were looking at Pure is that they had more of an in-place upgrade option going forward, kind of future-proofing things. We hear Dell is working towards that, but they weren't quite there, especially three years ago.

We acquired our first Dell PowerStore three years ago.

In terms of reliability and stability, everything has been stable with Dell PowerStore, so I cannot complain.

Dell PowerStore has had no problem scaling to our needs. We have expanded a couple of times in the last few years and had no issues.

If I were giving advice to another company looking at Dell PowerStore, I would say that you cannot go wrong with Dell, as the sales and support teams are always top notch.

Positive

As a long-time Dell EMC customer, we did look at Pure Storage as well, but we ended up sticking with Dell.

We had a Professional Services engagement that helped with the installing and configuration of Dell PowerStore. My experience with Professional Services for Dell PowerStore was good, smooth, and without problems.

The return on investment from Dell PowerStore has been as expected.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight overall.

We primarily use Dell PowerStore as part of our VMware infrastructure and other Dell servers.

The biggest improvement we found when moving into Dell PowerStore was the deduplication and compression. I did not believe we could get that much storage into one. However, the solution brought it down and compressed everything, which was amazing.

We went from Compellent, which was over 100 terabytes, down to Dell PowerStore, which was 30 terabytes. It significantly saved on rack space, power, and cooling.

Our organization uses CloudIQ to manage and analyze our Dell storage. It's a little confusing because we have multiple IT shops, and I can see what other groups are using. I can only see what I can see, and they can only see what they see. So, it becomes more of a viewing thing than actually doing.

We were looking to replace our old Compellent hardware by implementing Dell PowerStore. The data reduction with Dell PowerStore was much better than we had with Compellent. It was truly amazing.

We are utilizing Dell PowerStore’s integration with VMware, which makes it a lot easier to manage.

We have been able to reduce our organizational footprint using Dell PowerStore. We went from 18U of rack space down to 2U.

We have two different PowerStores in two different geographical locations, but they're separate workloads altogether. They're not replicated or anything like that.

When you purchase the solution, it comes with professional services, and our experience with them has been great.

Dell PowerStore is far superior to other Dell products we've used over the years, such as EqualLogic and Compellent. I would recommend the solution to other users because it is worthwhile.

Sometimes, you have to go back and forth with the technical support team, where they want you to do something you've already done.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for a couple of years.

We haven't had to scale out the tool because we sized it right. Based on all our research, scaling out the solution should be pretty straightforward if we ever need to.

The solution’s technical support is pretty good. Sometimes, you have to go back and forth with the technical support team, where they want you to do something you've already done.

Positive

We previously used Compellent. We switched to Dell PowerStore because Compellent was approaching end-of-life.

Before choosing the solution, we evaluated Pure Storage. We chose Dell PowerStore because Dell is a trusted partner.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use Dell PowerStore for our SAN appliances. It holds and runs pretty much all of our infrastructure. All our network devices connect to it, and then that runs block-based storage for all our VMs.

Dell PowerStore has really expanded our storage abilities, whereas we were earlier locked up with physical space storing stuff. We used to run out of space, and getting that extra footprint helps.

The solution's most valuable features are its form factor and switching to NVMe. Dell has lowered its footprint and power consumption. Regarding functionality, the management in the box itself between the nodes and automation between the nodes are quite nice.

CloudIQ is a fantastic feature that gives us a good overview of everything we have. With the depreciation of the SRS, we have to use that quite a lot more because they're moving everything over to CloudIQ. CloudIQ has been nice on a very broad term for our multiple appliances. Even with Dell PowerStore, we have the ability to keep an eye on two because they're not clustered together.

Dell PowerStore has been amazing in its overall energy consumption. The solution's ability to not have to max out a circuit just for our storage rack is amazing. It gave us a lot more freedom to expand with the existing power that we already have without having to get electricians to redo everything.

We were looking to address the challenges of physical storage size and power consumption by implementing the solution.

The data-at-rest encryption and its encryption features allow us to get to a higher consistent level of security possible.

The ability to use Dell PowerStore for our AI-driven workloads is very important. The processing isn't done there, but the AI systems being processed are still stored on the endpoints.

We have been able to reduce our organizational footprint by one standard rack using Dell PowerStore.

We had an issue where we lost both nodes, completely lost all our caching, and had to rebuild that whole appliance from scratch. We need to find a way to ensure the cache data is safe and secure. When we're maintaining it, it takes five to ten extra minutes to confirm it so we don't run the risk of something happening. There needs to be some sort of better feedback between the two nodes.

The one was running online as a master, but somehow, the caching was lost because both the nodes were offline. No one had any references to that cached data, which completely destroyed our data. Something needs to be done with the caching to ensure that if some issue occurs, there needs to be an ability to disable caching during maintenance to make it static, safe, and good.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for two years.

The solution's stability is good.

Dell PowerStore is a super scalable solution.

The solution’s technical support is amazing.

Positive

We switched from our previous solution to Dell PowerStore because it was getting old and taking up too much space in the rack. Since we didn't have any more racks, we didn't have any more plugs.

Since Dell did the deployment for us, it was as smooth as it could be.

Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

Most of our solution's use cases include VMware. There are migrations from several different platforms and servers using virtual environments.

Several of our customers with just SSD components implemented Dell PowerStore, and their reporting time went from two hours to ten minutes.

The solution's migration feature is very valuable, but the most valuable aspect is that more features appear with every iteration of the software.

Our organization uses CloudIQ to manage and analyze our Dell storage. Using CloudIQ has benefited our organization by projecting when we'll be full and telling us about the mechanics of things. It really gets ahead of any problems.

The solution's overall energy consumption would be less than that of SSDs or traditional drives.

Dell Technologies has good environment, social, and governance (ESG) values.

We implemented Dell PowerStore to address the challenges of speed and our in-line compression. The solution also helps with power efficiency, scalability, and data reduction.

Dell will say the data reduction is four, but realistically, it's 2.5. If the customer approaches Dell, they ask the customer to read the fine print. I've had to buy drives for my customers because Dell was unclear on making it good. So, we made it good ourselves because of our reputation.

We use Veeam for backup because Dell cybersecurity is a lot expensive.

We use Dell PowerStore's integration with VMware. Since the solution is integrated with VMware, we can perform many of our controls from VMware vCenter.

We have been able to reduce our organizational footprint using Dell PowerStore. We had a component with six departments, and we went from 12U to 2U, which probably used less power.

The environment in which this solution is used depends on the customer. Most of the time, it's either in a data center or a corporation.

Two clients use AWS, and others use Azure to deploy the solution. Dell PowerStore is a reliable solution.

The solution's pricing needs to be moderated a bit. As a partner, I'd like to be added to each customer's CloudIQ to take a look.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for three years and five months.

Dell PowerStore is a stable solution.

The solution provides good scalability.

The solution provides good technical support.

Positive

I previously used the Compellent solution. We switched to Dell PowerStore because Compellent was approaching its end of life, and all its features are included in Dell PowerStore.

Dell PowerStore is implemented in the data center in person, and we've been doing the deployment ourselves as a certified partner.

The solution provides a return on investment within 12 to 18 months.

The solution’s pricing is always too high.

Before choosing Dell PowerStore, we evaluated Pure Storage.

Overall, I rate the solution nine and a half out of ten.

We have a lot of distribution centers, and we are looking at infrastructure that gives us that low latency and helps us with the IoT and edge computing, like, robotic arms and things like that.

We implemented Dell PowerStore to address security and latency in our infrastructure.

The biggest benefit we have seen from Dell is the speed to market. In the past, we struggled to meet demand in our facilities, and with the Dell partnership, we are seeing the benefit.

Dell PowerStore helps with our workload reduction. At the end of the day, our goal is to reduce our TCO. 

The latency and the security are the most valuable features of Dell PowerStore. The latency is important because we are a distribution center that has workers who pick drugs and medical devices off the conveyor belt, so the efficiency is important. We also want to make sure that everything is secure and that we have an easy way to manage our infrastructure. 

Dell PowerStore can improve the integration with VMware.

I have been evaluating Dell PowerStore for six months.

So far the stability has been good.

We have not had any concerns about the scalability so far.

The technical support has been good so far but we are still in the evaluation phase and have not run into any major issues.

Positive

We previously used Pure Storage and a lot of legacy tools. We switched to Dell PowerStore based on the recommendations from Dell about the increased security and what we heard from others that PowerStore is a better solution.

The deployment was good.

We used Storage IT and Dell for the implementation.

We evaluated Pure but decided on PowerStore because of the cost.

I would rate Dell PowerStore eight out of ten for its security and TCO.